My guest on the podcast today is Bob Edwards, MSW. Bob holds degrees in Religious Education, Social Development Studies and Social Work. Bob has been a Social Worker since 1996, providing psychotherapy, and he was the Director of Counseling Studies at a multi-denominational Bible College, teaching courses in Psychology, Sociology and Counseling. Bob and his wife, Helga Edwards, MSW, have a ministry together called Awake Deborah, in which they use their gifts and training to help people experience freedom and wholeness in their lives and relationships. Helga Edwards has many helpful teachings posted on her YouTube channel, and they had a podcast together at awakedeborah.podbean.com
Bob is another friend I’ve made in my fifteen years long online search for beautiful examples of Christianity. I asked Bob to explain social conditioning for the podcast because it was revolutionary for me to learn from him how this process had contributed to my own patriarchal worldview, and has been impactful in my healing from that. I’m so excited to share this episode with you all today and hope you find it enlightening and beautiful.
Here is the YouTube video I referenced in our conversation: The Origins of Male Authority in the Church, in which Bob describes the process of social conditioning at greater length, and draws historical examples of theologians interpreting the Bible through patriarchal cognitive lenses.
Other works I’d like to recommend from Bob and Helga Edwards:
I read Bob’s excellent book, A God I’d Like to Meet:Separating the Love of God from Harmful Traditional Beliefs, in 2014, and reviewed it here. Edwards’ book explains how Christian theologians, specifically Calvinists, have been influenced by ancient Greek philosophy, which has warped the way they view God. You probably could not find a Christian who would disagree with the statement that “God is love” (1 John 4:8), but how many Christians live as though they are a bug under the thumb of God? This is a really helpful book especially for those who have experienced spiritual trauma or abuse and are looking to heal their image of God.
I also really enjoyed reading Bob’s work of historical fantasy, Keeper of Relics which imagined a harshly matriarchal ancient world in which a young woman challenged oppressive tradition.
Bob and Helga together wrote The Equality Workbook: Freedom in Christ from the Oppression of Patriarchy to help readers identify and remove patriarchal bias from Bible translations. They demonstrate that patriarchy is a human tradition rooted in prejudice and they help women recover from the harmful effects of patriarchy.
Bob is currently working on a series called God Decolonized, exploring historical examples of people in power using the Bible to justify oppression and exploitation. I’m currently reading Issue 3, in which he threads the link from Puritan theocracy to Christian nationalism today. Some of the Puritan quotes are distressingly hateful!
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TRANSCRIPT:
Ruth Perry (00:16) Today’s conversation is one that feels deeply personal to me because we’re talking about something most of us don’t even realize is happening inside us, socialization, and more specifically gender socialization and how it shapes the way we see the world, the church, and even scripture itself. My guest is Bob Edwards, a social worker and psychotherapist with degrees in Religious Education, Social Development Studies, and Social Work.
Bob has been practicing since 1996, and formerly served as Director of Counseling Studies at a multi-denominational Bible college where he taught psychology, sociology, and counseling. And he and his wife, Helga Edwards, also a social worker, lead a ministry called Awake Deborah, where they help people experience freedom and wholeness in their lives and relationships.
In this episode, Bob helps us understand how the norms of our culture get inside us, how they become automatic, invisible lenses through which we interpret everything. We talk about how patriarchal socialization can shape the way we read the Bible, the split-second judgments our brains make before even aware of them, and the real spiritual and emotional cost when people, especially women, are told their God-given gifts don’t belong.
I’m grateful especially that Bob was willing to have this conversation as he is dealing with long COVID since 2021. We kept our conversation brief to accommodate his health limitations. But if you want to learn more about this topic, there is a link to an older and much longer teaching from Bob on this topic in the show notes and on my blog, thebeautifulkingdombuilders.com. This is a conversation about unlearning, about healing, and about removing some of the stones that have stood in the way of people fully walking toward Jesus.
Ruth Perry (02:12) Thank you so much for being on the podcast today, Bob. Let’s just dive right in. My first question for you is what is socialization generally and gender socialization specifically?
Bob Edwards (02:15) Okay, well, socialization is really the process by which groups convey their norms to its members. You know, there’s lots of examples we could think of, everyday examples. One would be table manners, you know. When I was growing up, in our household we learned that when you cut your food you held your fork in your left hand.
But then you had to switch to the right hand before you ate the food. Apparently that was in etiquette books from the 1920s and the 1950s. yeah, Another everyday example of socialization is just like rules of the road. North America, you drive on the right. And Great Britain, drive on the left.
And maybe there was a reason for it at one point, but it’s just a custom and gender socialization relates to how different, you know, each gender functions in a social group, what the norms are, norms and customs for that gender.
Ruth Perry (03:20) How does that socialization process happen?
Bob Edwards (03:23) Yeah, well there’s essentially three processes that happen. One is overt instruction. So like I mentioned the etiquette books, you’ll be instructed how to function in a society. The other is role modeling, where people just act as if certain things are true, certain things are a given.
And the third process is really called reinforcement. So if you do what the group expects of you, there’s different ways you can be rewarded. And if you don’t do what the group expects of you, there’s different ways you can be punished is probably the best way to say it. You know, if I would eat with the wrong hand, for example, one of the adults at the table would give me the look, you know. And the look is a form of reinforcement. And if you drive on the wrong side of the road, you’re likely to get immediate feedback from your environment of a variety of kinds, from natural consequences to law enforcement. So, yeah, those are essentially the three processes that help us be socialized into a group’s set of norms.
Ruth Perry (04:28) So your group will socialize you and then how does that become internalized?
Bob Edwards (04:32) Yeah, that’s a good question. So at some point, these external messages, we take ownership of them ourselves. And really, you can tell when that has happened by how you feel when you see somebody eating with the wrong hand. If it’s like I see a person taking a bite and the fork is still in their left hand and it feels wrong to me, then I know that I’ve internalized that. What used to be an external message is now something that’s coming from within.
Ruth Perry (05:01) How does this create a cognitive lens which affects our automatic perception?
Bob Edwards (05:05) Yeah, so it’s interesting. Psychologists refer to it as automatic appraisal. So it’s like, again, the example of the fork in the wrong hand. My experience will be that I just see that as wrong. You know, I just I’m watching it and it’s wrong. And it feels to me that the wrongness is coming from outside. But in reality, the sense of wrongness is coming from inside. It’s coming from the norms that I’ve internalized through the socialization process. And so in a way it affects how we’re interpreting the world around us constantly. You know, it’s just like a mental lens is another way of saying it that interprets everything that we see. And we think we’re just seeing the world as it is, but in reality we’re seeing the world as we’ve been socialized to see it, if that makes sense.
Ruth Perry (05:55) It does well. So then how does that impact our view of the world around us more specifically?
Bob Edwards (06:00) Well that’s, yeah, so it’s interesting. You know, with this driving example, I was just watching a clip recently of, I’m like a motorsports enthusiast. My dad used to sponsor races and stock cars and things like that when I was growing up, so that’s always been a part of my life.
And I remember when I was quite young, was in the mid 70s, and we went to see a drag race because he sponsored a drag racer back then. And there was a big deal about one of the drivers named Shirley Maldowney. So don’t know if you’ve heard of her, but she won the Top Fuel Drag Racing Championship which is sort of the highest level of competition three times and drove this beautiful pink dragster and at the time I didn’t realize why that was such a big deal but she was the first woman that was allowed to compete like women were banned from the sport they weren’t legally licensed and she really broke through that and so she’s kind of a hero of mine for doing that. It’s interesting that whole subculture, that drag racing motorsport subculture, they would look at men and see drag racers, people who can drive well and they would just look at women and think, nope, that’s not for you. You can’t do that.
And it becomes a little bit more serious in other cultures, although in a similar way. For example, Saudi Arabia didn’t allow women to period, until I think it was 2018. And there’s a province in Afghanistan currently where women are banned legally from driving, can’t get licenses. you know, the reasoning given for that is that they’re taught religiously that women are incapable of learning the skill of driving a vehicle. And in Saudi Arabia, they thought it was mixing genders for women to drive in a way that would lead to moral corruption.
So, you know, and, unfortunately we have things like that in our culture as well. We have, you know, women can drive, thankfully, but there’s lots of things in some churches that women can’t do. And most of those things are related to teaching, preaching, and leadership. And people have these lenses. And I don’t think they understand that they have these lenses many times. And I don’t think they know where they came from either. But they just look at women and think, you know, things come to mind like servant, helper, right? We’ve heard that term help meet, which is sort of bad English translation of something in Genesis. That language in Hebrew and even later in Greek just isn’t there. It’s an English invention. And these things really impact men and women every day in the Church and in the world.
Sometimes people look at the Bible and they think they see this gender hierarchy. But if you look very carefully at the text, especially in its original languages and context, the hierarchy isn’t coming from the text. It’s coming from the person who’s reading it. It’s coming from their cognitive lenses. It’s coming from their gender socialization.
Ruth Perry (09:18) I relate to all of that because I was raised in a patriarchal culture. I’m assuming that most people are. And so for the first 30 years of my life, I read the Bible through a patriarchal lens. And it just made sense. It made so much sense that that was how the world worked and that that’s what God meant. And so, yeah, I can totally get how that happens.
You’ve talked about these automatic responses with our cognitive lens, how quickly it happens. Can you explain how quickly we draw these conclusions?
Bob Edwards (09:49) Sure, yeah, for us it feels instant. So we don’t recognize that the meaning is coming from our lenses at all. We think we’re just seeing the world as it is. But we’re really not. We’re seeing the world as we’ve been socialized to see the world.
And I remember I was reading one neuropsychology text many years ago and the time was measured in millionths of seconds. So actually I think it was a fraction of a millionth of a second that our brain assigns those meanings. In fact it’s called stimulus coding. And one of the reasons we don’t realize it’s coming from inside is because it happens so quickly.
But also because it’s subconscious. We don’t do it on purpose. Our brains do it automatically, subconsciously, and almost instantly. So, it’s tricky.
Ruth Perry (10:39) So that an example of that then would be seeing a woman behind the pulpit and just immediately saying no.
Bob Edwards (10:45) Yeah, I’ve seen that, unfortunately, where I was at a Bible college teaching for many years. And there was an occasion at a chapel where a woman was speaking and teaching and preaching and to men and women. And one of the male students from a denomination that is very patriarchal just stood up and walked out and you know spoke to him afterwards and that was his reaction to seeing a woman teaching men. And that was very eye opening to me. And of course then there are so many other denominations represented who didn’t have that reaction because that wasn’t part of their training, it wasn’t part of their socialization.
Yeah, and when I was teaching there, you know, I saw and heard a lot of things that really broke my heart, to be honest with you. Women who felt called to express their spiritual gifts, which come from God, right? Like our spiritual gifts come from God, they don’t depend on anything from us. At least of all our gender, you know, that’s not where the power of God, the love of God, the grace of God comes from. We’re just the vessel, We’re clay vessels and all that grace and love and spiritual power comes from God. yeah, women were being told by some of their male classmates that their call to ministry must come from the devil.
That was one of the worst things I think I heard. And they got reinforcement, like negative reinforcement sometimes from their peer group anytime they would try to express their gifts. And I remember praying about that because it was so disturbing to me. And you know, God, what do we do with this?
And I had this really powerful vision while I was praying. It was so vivid, know, it kind of like I was dreaming, but I was awake. And I saw Jesus with his arms open, inviting all these women to come to him, you know, and on the path to Jesus were all these sharp stones and the women were cutting their feet on these sharp stones and some were still limping towards him. Sorry.
But others left the path altogether and were just sitting down bleeding in tears. And so in that experience I just ask God, what can I do?
I haven’t thought about this in a while, sorry. It’s like when I think about it I relive it.
He just said, Bob, you can remove some of the stones. Just start picking up stones. Right? And so, you know, I said, okay, yeah, I will do my best. I don’t do it perfectly. But God helping me, that’s what I feel like He’s asked me to do, you know, is to remove the stones. So, know, Helga and I have done that together. That’s my wife and I try to do that, again by example and through teaching, you know, and through encouragement. yeah, I felt like God really met me there, gave me some direction.
Ruth Perry (13:53) What a powerful vision and what a powerful calling. That was a calling from God and you’ve certainly been fulfilling it. And you’ve moved some stones for me, Bob, that I’m really grateful for because it’s quite the process trying to unlearn that conditioning. And I didn’t realize just how powerful my background was in my life until I encountered
Bob Edwards (14:05) Thank God. Yeah, for sure.
Ruth Perry (14:16) your work about conditioning and I’m really grateful. I’m going to share a YouTube video in the show notes where you talk about this in length and you go into different theologians who and translating scripture through a patriarchal cognitive lens. And that’s just really important for us to know how does awareness of our socialization and our cognitive lenses weaken or strength and our faith, do you think Bob?
Bob Edwards (14:40) Well, So I do want to touch on one of those theologians, you know, because it’s been so prolific in his writing and his influences, Saint Augustine. And he’s very open in Confessions, he writes something called Confessions, about the influence of Neoplatonism on his theology. And he had a mentor named Ambrose who introduced him to this.
So he had a role model that embraced it and then he had instruction, you know, and he got all kinds of positive reinforcement for choosing this path. And he says that he made sense of the Bible and God through the lens of this ancient Greek philosophy. And unfortunately, that particular ancient Greek philosophy is extremely patriarchal.
And just to give you, for instance, when he read Genesis, where Adam says of Eve, this is bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh, you know, meaning, at last somebody like me, right? Somebody comparable to me. Augustine didn’t see it that way. And he writes about this in one of his letters and says, so here we see woman stands for flesh.
Therefore the man must stand for the spirit. Therefore, just as the flesh must be subordinate to the spirit, women must be subordinate to men.” So that’s what he saw when he read that passage. But that’s not what the passage says. That’s not what’s there. But he evidently didn’t recognize his lens, which is so often the case.
And so you ask like, can it does this strengthen or weaken our faith when we explore these things? And I mean, for me, it was a tremendous encouragement to my faith because some like our culture is is fallen. Like humanity has fallen into sin and it is our cultures are are filled with injustices and biases and prejudice and fear and a felt need for control. And we can project that onto the Bible, start calling things like that God’s will. Sometimes we’re even seeing that today, even at a national level, things we’ve seen in the church and been speaking out against, now seeing in government.
But when we do this kind of work, right, with humility and prayer and study, we can begin to peel away these layers of bias, prejudice and injustice that are those sharp stones that stand between us and God. So I do believe it can strengthen our faith and I think it’s God’s work.
Ruth Perry (17:03) Amen. Thank you so much for being faithful to that calling, you and your wife.
Bob Edwards (17:07) I’m so thankful
I could be and I’m glad I could do this today. Thanks so much for having me.
Ruth Perry (17:13) God bless.
Bob Edwards (17:14) God bless you too.
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In this episode, Dr. Jennifer Powell McNutt discusses her insights on Mary Magdalene from her book, The Mary We Forgot.
Dr. McNutt describes her own faith journey leading her to the dual ministry of Church historian and Presbyterian minister, and then delves into the historical mischaracterization and significance of Mary Magdalene, and what “the apostle to the apostles” can teach us today: from the importance of her healing from demons to her financial support of Jesus’ ministry, being the first witness and messenger of the resurrection, and as a missionary to France in her later life.
Dr. McNutt and her husband, Rev. Dr. David McNutt, have a ministry called McNuttshell Ministries, a teaching, preaching, and writing ministry that serves both the church and the academy by sharing the Christian faith “in a nutshell.”
I was really excited to speak with Dr. McNutt after reading her beautiful, pastoral book, which was gifted to me from my brother, Rev. Dr. Matthew McNutt. It’s always fun to meet another McNutt doing good work out in the world! Here’s that adorable picture of my family with our nut shell sign my dad made; I’m guessing this is 1983 or 1984:
If you enjoy this episode, please Subscribe to The Beautiful Kingdom Builders podcast on your favorite platform, rate and review it, and share it with a friend! Every little bit of encouragement helps! You can watch our episode on YouTube or find it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and more!
TRANSCRIPT:
Ruth Perry (00:16) Well, Welcome to the Beautiful Kingdom Builders podcast, Dr. Jennifer Powell McNutt. I’m so honored to have you here today.
Jennifer Powell McNutt (00:20) Yay! Thank you so much for having me. What a delight.
Ruth Perry (00:25) I feel like, like you talk about in your book, our sibling relationship in Christ, and then we have that added layer of the last name.
Jennifer Powell McNutt (00:30) haha McNutt. I know we are definitely related. Well, by marriage. yeah. Yes.
Ruth Perry (00:38) Absolutely. I’m married out of it, so I’m Perry now, but growing up McNutt was very special, and so I thought that I should have my brother Matthew on so we have extra McNutts to join the fun. I wanted to show you this cool picture of my family. My dad made this sign with a bunch of different nuts, and I thought of this picture when I read the name of your ministry, McNuttshell Ministries. Very cute.
Jennifer Powell McNutt (00:46) I love it. Can’t have enough McNutts. Lean into it, you know? Just embrace it.
Matthew McNutt (01:04) I always just, yup, I always called my stuff the Nutt house, cause it’s like, we’re…
Jennifer Powell McNutt (01:09) Oh yeah. When I started teaching there was the McNutty professor, that movie or whatever had come out, know, so there’s that too. I was like, oh no.
Ruth Perry (01:19) I appreciate you bringing a lot of nobility and dignity to the name, you’re doing us well.
Jennifer Powell McNutt (01:23) Good, I’m glad I’m accepted. I’m earning my stripes. That’s good.
Ruth Perry (01:29) Yeah! My brother actually bought me your book for Christmas last year. And so that’s another reason why I wanted to have him in on this conversation, because he’s an avid reader and he loved your book. And I loved your book. I’m very excited to talk with you today about Mary Magdalene. But first, I want to talk to you about you. I’d love to hear about your personal faith journey, your testimony and just a little bit more about your background before we get into the book.
Jennifer Powell McNutt (02:02) Yeah, thank you so much. Yeah, my faith journey just begins with my family and the ministry that my parents led and as pastors, co-pastors even in our denomination, we’re Presbyterian and having met in seminary and all of that and just knowing Jesus from the beginning and loving Christ and wanting to follow Him and feeling like a part of my parents’ ministry in a very powerful, compelling, persuasive way. And those church communities, you know, just really embracing us too. In California and Texas. But also churches that they had after I went to college in Pennsylvania, San Diego, and now they live here with us, retired, mostly retired.
And so for me, there isn’t a time that I don’t remember loving Jesus and wanting to follow Him. But there were many particular moments where the Lord has directed me in my life and calling and desire to be equipped for this vocation that I’m in as a professor at Wheaton College, but then also as an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church and hoping to bridge that church and academy, that work, that it will enrich students and also churches. So for me, it just came from really as a child being called into ministry and that was like a pivot for my whole life. I was 10 years old and I was like, I’m going to seminary. yeah, it’s just been so interesting to see how I’ve been directed, in terms of my discipline too, and then just loving, especially the life of the classroom and know, adult education in the church and kind of the preaching parts came a little bit later for me. And I enjoy that as well so much, but my primary call is to the classroom. And so, you know, just how you go through life and make your decisions and do the best you can to be faithful and somehow the Lord directs you in the right path. So that’s been my hope at least.
Ruth Perry (04:20) That’s really beautiful that you have the academic and the pastoral dual calling. I’m curious to know, what do you see as the, greatest benefits of your church history background and expertise in your church ministry?
Jennifer Powell McNutt (04:35) Yeah, I just love to make that knowledge accessible that I really feel the importance of that to come in and to help deepen those roots and a sense of confidence in the faith and growth in the faith and also inviting those questions to that faith seeking understanding I think is so important.
To be able to grapple with the places where we’re uncomfortable, where we feel a tension, where we find a disconnect or a dissonance with our context and what Scripture’s saying or how we understand things. Those are all opportunities for going deeper, for the Lord using that in deeper ways. And so I love that part of it.
I’ve been doing a lot more just with all different denominations, churches all over the country and even outside of the US that come from their own history and their own context and the value of knowing the fullness of church history to the best of my abilities. Obviously there’s more than I could ever fully grasp, but nonetheless that you can speak
to people in their local spaces, in their local context in a way that maintains that larger story and helps them to see how they fit into God’s particular story and that universal story. So I’d to distill a richer perspective and connection that Christians have with one another today and with the past. So that’s my hope.
Matthew McNutt (06:14) Is there something about Wheaton College in particular that drew you or that you’ve particularly enjoyed serving there?
Jennifer Powell McNutt (06:22) Yeah, thank you. So I did go to Westmont College. It was Christian, liberal arts education. That was where I was really nurtured and knew about Wheaton. I never really expected to be at Wheaton. California girl going to the Midwest wasn’t exactly in my bingo card. yeah, but having taught as a doctoral preceptor in the university settings, I did long for the kind of relationship that you can have with your students, the mentoring relationship that you can have with your students at a Christian school and being able to like care about them as whole people and not just about their grades, or just about their minds, but about their whole life and who they are and kind of shepherding them through this time that we have together. And I found that there was kind of more of a distance at some of the university settings. We were required to have quite a distance. And so it’s just really wonderful to be at a school where you can just like pray with the student and they can share more about who they are and their sense of calling or vocational purpose. And yeah, you can just support them in a holistic way.
And so that’s the thing I’ve loved the most. And I think you would get that at other Christian schools too. But Wheaton does that really well, that integration of faith and learning, the connection between Scripture, theology, and context and just seeing how all those pieces fit together. And a lot of it too is how they valued me and supported me and made a place for my expertise and a place for me to thrive. So I’m very grateful for that. It’s been 18 years, so there’s definitely been ups and downs. Nothing is perfect, but on the whole, I would say, yeah, I think it’s been a really good experience.
Ruth Perry (08:28) Another follow-up question I have about your background is thinking about the Presbyterian denomination with their theology and their tradition and their history. What do you feel like the Presbyterian church has to offer to the broader Christian family that is of particular value and beauty?
Jennifer Powell McNutt (08:45) Well, I love that question. Thank you. We don’t always get to answer that. You know, like so many traditions, the Presbyterian Church is pretty fragmented, you know, in terms of so many different branches, certain branches that wouldn’t allow me to do ministry in as a woman. Other branches that don’t necessarily align with my own theological convictions fully.
So it’s always complex to navigate. And then there’s perception too, you know, of like a dominant voice in the tradition or majority voice in the tradition. So I always want to be very generous in my Reformed perspective. And the things that I love are the elements of humility that come into play for the tradition. I think it’s really important to remember, and I’ve spoken on this many times in different venues about that if we go back to our origins, our inception points, like in the 16th century, in the Reformation with John Calvin in Geneva, that so much of his ministry was dedicated to people who were displaced and living in exile and suffering from persecution. And so the theology that he emphasizes is God’s power and ability to be present with us, to save us even through the most devastating, catastrophic moments in our lives and that God’s goodness and God’s ability to save us is never diminished by those circumstances. And really trust in God’s loving, fatherly activity in our lives.
Also, I would say, that, as I mentioned, the humility, but that, the transcendence between, like, us humans and God, I think those are good reminders, too, as well that he’s capable to save and willing. Those are parts that I love, also love about Scripture, you know, Scripture as like, glasses that we put on to understand, to see the world clearly and to understand the world around us. I really strongly affirm that I believe that and experience that just at many different levels. So of God’s activity through that. Those are two things. I’ll add one third one. And that is something called, a little lesson here, duplex gratia, double grace.
I love the duplex gratia, which is that we are, just as we’re justified, that that is linked to our sanctification, that the Holy Spirit is at work in uniting us to Christ, in transforming our lives and sanctifying us, that we might be holy and righteous. So, those are three things I think that are sometimes missed in perceptions of the Reformed tradition, that context can give us some gratitude and appreciation for.
Ruth Perry (11:34) Beautiful, praise God.
Matthew McNutt (11:35) You wrote later in the book that Mary Magdalene’s place in the biblical story has been buried in the cellars and attics of our churches.” What drew you to study and write about Mary Magdalene?
Jennifer Powell McNutt (11:43) Yeah, thank you so much. There are a lot of layers to the story. So I’ll just say kind of one thing and then maybe you want to follow up. But one thing that I have been struck by is in coming out of a tradition in the branch of the Presbyterian Church that I was in, they were very attentive to women in the Bible. And there was a place to talk about that and to think about, I would say, kind of a Galatians 3.28 like, you know, church experience so that you could be called, you have gifts from the Holy Spirit that are not gendered and you know, that God could call you to serve anyone.
But even in that space and even in that context, there was still kind of a separation between some of the focus on the women in the Bible, in the pulpit, and the focus on the women of the Bible in the women’s ministry. So we still had that. And then in addition to that, in another layer, I don’t think anybody wanted to touch Mary Magdalene. So I grew up knowing Lydia and Deborah and Phoebe and those names before I was ever taught how to understand, think about Mary Magdalene.
And I think that’s a much larger problem. It’s not just in certain types of Protestant churches. It’s not just in the Protestant tradition. It’s in the Roman Catholic Church. It’s much broader than this. It’s kind of a Christian issue of how to interpret and understand Mary Magdalene. And so when, as a professor with many years in my research, I began to notice more and more in my classrooms and discussion theology I was doing references to women in the Bible and the Reformation and seeing how they are talking about Mary Magdalene kind of brought it to the surface of this is really different than what we see in our culture because there’s a cultural discussion and also what we’re seeing in our churches.
Kind of seeing the need. And for me, first, I only saw it as for women. Like, let’s talk about Mary Magdalene for women. And I was invited to have those opportunities to share that kind of perspective. But through the process of getting the book to be accepted and published, I began to realize, this is for the whole church. It’s not just for women. And that’s because the gospel writers invite the whole church to see Mary Magdalene’s presence and her witness and her calling by Christ to proclaim. So that’s been great. So it’s kind of like a growth process, I would say like over time, you know how the Lord plants a seed, you know, I was a doctoral student when the Da Vinci code took off, I was in Scotland, everybody was talking about it. It was in every bookstore window. There were bookstores back then. you know, every bookstore window, everybody’s talking about it. And now when I look back at that time, I realized that the church was so susceptible to that cultural moment and the confusion that erupted from that cultural moment because there had been no clarity about her, you know, before that.
So I bring also that to the writing of the book, that experience as well. Did you guys experience that? I don’t know. Like when, you know, when the DaVinci code came out and.
Matthew McNutt (15:16) I remember when it came out.
Ruth Perry (15:16) I felt like reading, one of the things I loved about your book is that all of the references you made were a part of my life. I just felt like we would be friends if we knew each other. And I really enjoyed that aspect of reading your book too. I was thinking about when I first started, so Matthew and I grew up conservative Baptist. And so we were definitely of a mind that, spiritual authority belonged to men in the church and the home and read the Bible through that lens. And when I started rethinking that, because I had received a call from God when I was 30 years old, so I was way behind you in that process.
But it was when I was 30, so I started trying to read the Bible through a new lens. And I was frequently told I was reading the Bible through a flawed hermeneutic because most of the people I knew were still conservative. So they were being critical of my questions and the new things I was discovering in the Bible. And I just love that you describe it as a hermeneutic of surprise. Just seeing how God elevates women in the Bible. I don’t know that everybody listening to my podcast knows what the word hermeneutic means, so maybe explain the word hermeneutic and then also just talk more about that hermeneutic as a surprise.
Jennifer Powell McNutt (16:32) Sure, absolutely. Thank you. So hermeneutic means basically just interpretation. And so when you study hermeneutics, you’re studying different ways of interpreting. So there’s different approaches or methods for interpreting Scripture. Of course, hermeneutics can be used for other sources as well. But there are those critical lenses that are used to understand the text and methods to get at the meaning of the text in its context or how it, you know, the different, they would say, percopes or like portions of Scripture, how they are placed intentionally side by side and what the meaning is for that. There’s all different approaches.
So I was coming from a context that was kind of more like saying, there’s not enough women in the Bible. It’s not enough and it’s not empowering to women because they’re not really present enough in the gospels or in the texts. And so as a historian, it’s important that we understand literature in its context, you know, what were the practices and approaches that you would expect in that time period for how they would write about it. And the thing is, is that they wouldn’t reference women at all.
And so when we say like 200 named women isn’t enough, we’re kind of coming at it from, I think, the wrong side. We need to turn around and go the opposite direction about what does it mean to add 200 women into the text and to highlight their names. Or just to leave them unnamed even, but still present in the story is really interesting. So the hermeneutic of surprise is intended to challenge the hermeneutic of suspicion to an extent, to say that suspicion isn’t always the best disposition of a reader of Scripture because we can miss all the surprising ways that the text in its context is telling the story. So we can be surprised ourselves from our own context, we don’t expect, you know, gentleness to be emphasized or whatever it might be.
And that’s like us growing in how the text relates to our place today as Christians. But the text itself already has embedded moments of surprise within the text that we miss if we only read it from our context. We have to try to read it from the space in that time to see what is being highlighted. So I just have a few different examples that I try to show, but I think once you approach it that way, you’ll begin to see the whole of Scripture, so many surprising parts of Scripture that just sometimes requires to sit a little bit more with, to seek to learn and to study and to, sit under a, knowledgeable teacher to help you to read Scripture with more insight and perspective. I think that can be very useful. All of us can benefit from that at different points, including myself.
Matthew McNutt (19:52) I mean, you’ve already touched on this a little bit, right? That Mary Magdala’s story has been muddled and obscured throughout history. And even just talking about how the church is not very familiar with her. How do you disentangle her from the other Marys in the Gospels, from the unnamed women that she gets lumped in with?
Jennifer Powell McNutt (20:13) Right, yes. Well, I think the first thing, my first question was how did this happen? So again, coming in as a historian and trying to go back to some of the original interpretations of Mary Magdalene. So especially looking at Irenaeus of Lyon is a father for the church in the West and the East. So it’s a really interesting starting point to see a trajectory that’s established there and to understand how the early church especially was engaging with Mary Magdalene because the church can’t ignore her because she is the only one who is named by all four gospels as present at the empty tomb and then as first witness by both John’s gospel and Matthew’s gospel.
And so there’s no Easter sermon without Mary Magdalene. And that means that she is someone that we can kind of track in the history of interpretation and see some of the shifts that took place. The thing that I became alert to was how, and I talk about in the book, so with charts, which I think are really helpful because it gets complicated. But what I noticed was especially the importance of Augustine’s voice for the Western branch of the church in his readings of the women that anointed Jesus, that there’s a story of a woman anointing Jesus in each of the four gospels, and that three of the women mentioned are anonymous, but that one woman is noted as Mary, who’s coming from Bethany.
And so we know her as Mary Bethany. And that was really the beginning of the shift to see her as a prostitute because of Luke 7. So just go back and read Luke 7 and then notice too that Luke 8 is where Mary Magdalene is named and identified with Magdala. so the church kind of gets into seeing her as the sinner woman and so there’s first the conflation of the anointings and then there’s a conflation with the Marys and that’s formalized in the seventh century and that continues to be the tradition. But what I loved about the history of it too is that it’s not a very simple story, it’s not so consistent.
And there are many other layers to how the church has also remembered her because there’s other parts of her story because she’s so prominent in so many elements of Christ’s ministry from Galilee to Jerusalem, all the way to the empty tomb. So she’s there, you know, for all these things. And so sometimes when the church is emphasizing, evangelism and preaching, they focus more on her as a preacher and as an evangelist and as an apostle to the apostles. And so I was able in that research and in that tracking also to correct some of the confusion around the history of her reception, as well as to confirm, that this has been very complex. Like, it’s not surprising that we’ve been confused about it for so long.
And then I think because of that confusion, the church has been uncertain about what it means when we point to her. What does it mean when we point to Mary Magdalene? I never had anyone say to me, you should be like Mary Magdalene. You know, as a young Christian woman, like that would be like, is that an insult? Like, what are you saying to me right now? And so I think the church has been a little bit maybe afraid even to point to her because of the, you know, lack of clarity in that message. And so my hope is that the book can kind of give her back to the church in a clearer way to say, we actually really need to grapple with this because she’s pointing us to the risen Christ and she has such an important role in the gospels. It’s not something you can set aside. It’s actually really critical to our understanding of Jesus. And it’s okay, you know, to point to her because this is what she means according to the Bible.
Ruth Perry (24:37) Yeah, you use the language of the church playing telephone with Mary Magdalene, which I thought was really appropriate. And then you also talk about our collective memory loss about her. But it was very fascinating for me to read about Mary beyond the Bible. I had never heard anything about her history past the Bible. I’ve heard about the apostles. And so that was really fascinating. Would you tell us more about where Mary went after the biblical text?
Jennifer Powell McNutt (25:07) I mean, we don’t know for sure, so I’ll just start there. But it is pretty remarkable that the church has held on to the remembrance of her, her accepting Christ’s call to proclaim that he’s risen and also the words that he gave to her and that he doesn’t that she doesn’t stop doing that. I like to it’s not like she’s just like passing a note to the remaining disciples, and then goes on her way. the church has remembered her as living out that call for the rest of her life. And that makes so much sense to me as someone who, as Mary Magdalene was someone who was welcomed into his ministry from Galilee, who was a benefactor and disciple, was a student of Jesus’s.
Then was the cross and at the tomb and all these places. So I like to highlight that she’s there for everything and the Gospels mention that to us. So then the church remembers that she continues in her ministry and that she actually travels to France and that she evangelizes France, which by the way is the beginning of Christianity in the western side of the Roman Empire.
So for her to go from Jerusalem to France is absolutely possible. And the fact that all of the followers of Jesus are really scattered or missional in their work after Pentecost and even kind before that or in the Jerusalem area, but Pentecost really is like moving people outside of Jerusalem into these other locations and places. And then the dangers that were present for Christians in this time. We know that from a second century Greek philosopher who was an opponent of Christianity, that he knew about Mary Magdalene.
He knew that the Christian faith was based upon her testimony of Christ’s resurrection. That was like a widespread thing that was known. And he is very critical of her because she was weeping and she’s a woman and you’re not supposed to have those things as the basis of your truth. Which is surprising, by the way, the hermeneutic is a surprise.
So we know that she was known at the time and so her life could have, very likely would have been in danger as a result. so, yes, there’s lots that is possible about that. And we as Christians in the West, though in France they remember this, but outside of France, a lot of people don’t know this part of our Western story that it’s rooted in Mary Magdalene’s claim and witness to Christ, the apostolicity comes through her for the Western Church. And so, and that’s not just a Roman Catholic tradition, but that’s also evident in recognized in the Reformation among some of the Protestant traditions that are emerging in the Reformation. yeah, so that’s very exciting, I think, to highlight and feature.
But in later periods as the Roman Catholic Church was moving towards a hermetic monasticism, in kind of isolated living in caves, that kind of thing, her story takes on a lot of hagiographical elements. It too easily lines up with the way that you’re supposed to be devoted to the church in that time. Like she suddenly seems like a medieval woman. She’s definitely not a medieval woman. So that’s when you’re like, that’s, that’s pretty ridiculous. You know, that’s, that didn’t happen. But, did she come initially to France? She certainly could have. And so that’s something to know, I think, and, to allow for the possibility of.
And yeah, in the book, I’ll just say our family went there, I share about our journey going to those churches and those locations where she is remembered and just kind of sorting that part of the story out and thinking through it. yeah.
Ruth Perry (29:19) And possibly seeing her skull. That’s quite something. Yeah.
Jennifer Powell McNutt (29:22) Yes, we saw a skull that is attributed to Mary Magdalene. That was shocking.
Ruth Perry (29:33) I was also thinking in your answer about the danger that she was in in France, the danger that you point out that she was in at the foot of the cross, bearing witness to Jesus’ crucifixion. I had never thought about that before.
Jennifer Powell McNutt (29:37) Yeah, just the Roman Empire. Yes, it’s so interesting to think too about how the Gospels do give us all the pieces, even though we don’t get the fullness of the story. But we have to remember that there is a selectivity for all of the people in the biblical stories. You know, we don’t get to hear very much about Joseph, you know, but we know he was so important and that he had this, you know, what is highlighted about him is what we are invited to remember.
And, you know, we love to see more about Jesus’s mother. There’s a few glimpses. And then the last time we see her is in the upper room waiting for Pentecost to take place. So that also allows us to see that she was present in other ways. so we want to value the ways in which Scripture reveals portions of the story to us, even as we recognize that the full, all of the elements are not always revealed to us. And I don’t think we need every element in order to appreciate the pieces that Scripture does reveal.
Matthew McNutt (30:50) You talk about the importance of correcting mischaracterizations of Mary Magdalene, and there’s a part of it, as a youth pastor for 25 years, I’m kind of dancing around my head, man, what would it look like to more intentionally teach about Mary? You know, when there’s time looking at the calendar to teach and do all of this, why should Christians care about teaching about her, about correcting these mischaracterizations, about taking time to invest in knowing Mary’s story.
Jennifer Powell McNutt (31:26) Thank you so much. I love that question. I’m going to have a hard time keeping this tight. So I can talk about this a lot. Okay. So the first thing I would say is we need to expand our imagination for how we can see her as theologically and biblically significant in our ministries.
There are many pieces to her story, but oftentimes it becomes reduced to was she a prostitute or not? It’s an easy answer. She wasn’t. Okay, so now we have to move on. Who was she? Okay, so this is where I think actually churches could and should emphasize her as an example for stewardship, right? What is she doing? She is a patron of Jesus’s ministry. Luke chapter eight highlights her and other women that are financially supporting Jesus’s ministry and traveling with him. And when we realized that not everybody was allowed to go with Jesus, not everybody was invited to be with him in that kind of intimate way.
We can say, this is really significant. Their presence there is significant. So it actually completely transforms. And I would say that I was writing this before The Chosen was kind of starting to do this, but The Chosen is such a helpful step forward in allowing us to reimagine beyond the 12, right? So there are the 12 men that are invited to be part of Jesus’ ministry, but there are many women, that’s what Luke chapter eight says, many women, and then certain women who have key roles that are with Jesus and traveling with him and receiving teaching and being part of his ministry and probably were part of the 70 that were sent out because many times these were male and female, like married couples, according to some of the best scholarship on the topic. So we just need to expand the ministry to, and we need to be clear when we say disciples, we actually mean men and women. We say the 12 we are talking about these men. And those are not exactly the same.
So we need to change the way we talk about it so that people don’t associate disciples with male exclusive participation. So that’s one part of it. It transforms the way we see Jesus’s ministry. We can see how stewardship is involved, right? How we’re using finances to support him. And then we can also expand our understanding of the importance of the empty tomb. My experience has been, and again, even in a tradition that has been alert to women’s call to ministry that we don’t know anything about the women of Luke eight. And then all of a sudden on Easter morning, we’re like, we hear that there are women there and we think that they’re just any women, but they aren’t. They have been there the whole time. And so their witness is so much greater actually than just that they happen to be there at the empty tomb in that moment. But it’s everything that Jesus has done for them up until that moment.
And so in Mary Magdalene’s case, now we have to grapple with demon oppression, right? We have to, and that is something our churches definitely don’t want to talk about in my experience, right? How do we talk about this part of her story? So these are women who have been healed from the grip of basically the greatest evil that they could experience. In Mary Magdalene’s case, seven demons, Jesus talks about how significant seven demons are in Matthew chapter 12, he highlights that for us, what could happen with seven demons, and that’s what she has. And so that’s where we have to say, what does it mean when the gospels are highlighting for us that Jesus conquers demons, right? What does that tell us about who Christ is and about the power of the Lord and about God’s kingdom and the kingdom come?
And Mary Magdalene’s witness then, if we are so wrapped up in thinking about her as a prostitute and unwilling or afraid to talk about her as a woman who has been delivered from demonic presence, she is the witness at the tomb, then we are going to miss the fullness of what it means when she points us to the risen Christ. We’re going to think it’s one thing when it’s actually another.
So there are many women, there’s different groups of women that are there, but the particularity of Mary Magdalene’s presence is highlighting for us that Jesus is King, that he has conquered evil for us and that God’s kingdom has arrived. And so that’s how Jesus invites us to understand this part of his ministry.
And when we do that, we can also embrace the texts that are outside of Scripture that recognize and identify Jesus as exorcist, that this is widely known at the time that he is a very successful exorcist. So that brings us also into their context, into that time and what that means for us today. Then pastorally, I would just say it means that whatever the thing is that has gripped you, right? In that, you know, I like to talk about a sheep that is, you know, at the bottom of that pit.
Jesus talks about this in Matthew 12, you know, the sheep that’s at the bottom of the pit, it’s the Sabbath and no one can save this sheep. And yet the Son of God can, right? The Son of God comes in and can save the sheep, pull it out of the pit. And that’s us. That’s a proclamation of God’s power in our lives and the possibility of his work in our lives. So that’s a message that the church needs to hear, I think, it’s exciting to hear that and when we receive her, we can receive that kind of biblical theological message. Does that answer the question? Okay.
Matthew McNutt (37:14) That’s good. That’s good. And it’s funny. I was even kind of reacting to, know, when you talk about people’s aversion to talking about her because they think she was a prostitute, which she was not. But then I was also sitting here, but it’s funny. We have no aversion to talking about Paul, who was a murderer and a blasphemer before he started preaching. We have no aversion to talking about Matthew, who was a tax collector, which was, you know, a traitor to the people. And, such a horrible practice that they would separate sinners and then you had tax. It’s like we don’t have that same aversion for the men with complicated pasts as we do for her.
Jennifer Powell McNutt (37:53) Yeah, exactly. That’s so true. Or we make all the women former prostitutes, right? That’s the other thing that we end up doing is saying this is the only story that a woman in Scripture can have. And so we miss, you know, these other stories.
Matthew McNutt (38:08) I love the book, Vindicating the Vixens, which is just a collection of stories of how we’ve sexualized and vixenized all these different women whose stories were not actually like that. It a really cool book.
Jennifer Powell McNutt (38:11) Yes! I love that book too, thank you for highlighting that. It’s really important book.
Matthew McNutt (38:24) Except we’re talking about yours.
Jennifer Powell McNutt (38:26) That’s okay. I tried to fill up my book with footnotes, with citations, so people can go. You’ll see that book is in there and referenced, and many other wonderful books. I was kind of bringing those biblical voices together, seeing a need even in biblical scholarship and commentaries, to try to piece together the story of Mary Magdalene. So I’m bringing the church history, but also some of the best biblical scholarship out there to help us to see the story. So yeah, please use those footnotes and read these other books, because they help me too. That’s how I was able to do my work.
Ruth Perry (39:03) You say, “In an era of de-churching and faith deconstruction, Mary Magdalene can serve as a model of steady faith in Christ, even when our churches fail us and hurt us.”
And “Her readiness to run is the outworking of her readiness to follow and give of herself and her resources to Christ’s ministry.”
I thought those are two beautiful quotes about Mary Magdalene from your book, but I was also wondering, How does her faith challenge and inspire you and your discipleship in ministry? Dr. McNutt.
Jennifer Powell McNutt (39:33) Thank you so much. I was really struck when I was kind of piecing together her story, how everything around her was really crumbling or changing rapidly, you know, in just a very short amount of time. The shock of, the betrayal that took place within their community, and her being elevated out of that in a very special way. There are so many surprising things going on and it did really strike me because working in church history, you will very quickly come to all the failures and problems that the church has faced, the mistakes, the blind spots, the failures.
They’re there. And of course, in our church today, we see those too. I think church history can help with that, to see there is an enduring struggle for the church to live in to sanctification and to keep repenting. Just as individuals, are called to live a life of repentance to continually turn back to Christ, so too are our churches, and to focus on Christ, to put Christ really at the center. And I think for me, Mary Magdalene has become such a powerful example of centering Christ in your life. I’m amazed.
Whatever it was she was doing before, we don’t really know what was going on exactly before that, except for her suffering. But we don’t know exactly what that looked like or anything. But the Gospels invite us to remember that she, her whole life becomes focused around Christ walking. I love this walking literally in his footsteps. The direction of her finances become focused on building Christ’s ministry, being a faithful witness, and she is faithful and doing something very hard that she’s called to do. And that does inspire me. It does remind me.
And so when I see the structure of the church, and I’m speaking as a Reformation scholar, so I talk about this all the time, right? The failures of the structure of the church to keep our focus and center on Christ and building Christ’s ministry. And I do think that that can be helpful. That doesn’t condone the mistakes or the pain or the importance of whatever actions might happen. But we don’t abandon Christ even when our churches fail us, and they certainly do. So that’s a hard reality as being saved by Christ and being transformed by Christ, but also being transformed by Christ at the same time and all the future that we look to in that transformation. yeah, so those are a few thoughts for how she’s inspired me.
She really has become such a central voice in my faith. And I would say I’ve gotten this question from other podcasts where they’re like, did you always love her, always feel drawn to her. And my honest answer is no. I wasn’t because I didn’t know what to think about her because my church also didn’t know what to think about her. So it’s been a delightful surprise to see how she can have a more prominent place in my own faith journey with Christ.
Ruth Perry (42:58) And what do you think Mary would say to the church today?
Jennifer Powell McNutt (43:01) What would she say? She would probably say the same thing. You have been, the words that Jesus gave to her, which is that Jesus is our brother and God is our father, and we are part of this family, and basically proclaim that he is risen, and keep it about the resurrection and all that that means for us today. But I’ve think she would have a lot of good insight beyond what the text can reveal to us. How are we using our money? There’s another one. Right.
Matthew McNutt (43:31) This has been, I’ve really appreciated the insights and just hearing some of your heart and passion behind your work and what led you to this and expanding some of what we’ve read in your book. So thank you so much for that.
Jennifer Powell McNutt (43:31) Thank you, Matthew. It was a wonderful conversation with you both. I’m so grateful for the invitation and I look forward to, yeah, I hope more conversations together and we’ll meet in person someday, I hope.
Ruth Perry (43:59) Thank you for the gift that your life and testimony is to the church, Dr. McNutt. We appreciate you. Thank you for your time today.
Jennifer Powell McNutt (44:03) I appreciate you. Thank you for having me. I was blessed by our conversation. Thank you.
Thanks for visiting The Beautiful Kingdom Builders! Here is the link again for Dr. McNutt’s book, The Mary We Forgot. It is an amazingly pastoral work that will give you so much food for thought and moments of surprise!
We’re excited about our new podcast and hope to bring light to the darkness through these conversations about gender, abuse, justice and healing in the Christian Faith. Follow along here (you can subscribe by email on the right-hand menu under our page description) or on your favorite podcast platform and social media: YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Bluesky, Pinterest, and TikTok!
My guest this week is my former Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary professor, Dr. Roy Ciampa, whose transformative class, Ephesians in Depth, has stayed with me over the years as my faith has grown and changed. In this conversation, we discuss the theological implications of Paul’s writings, the cultural context of the Greco-Roman world, and the significance of mutual submission in relationships. Dr. Ciampa shares insights from his academic background and teaching experiences, emphasizing the importance of understanding scripture in its historical context. The dialogue highlights the beauty of God’s love and grace, encouraging listeners to reflect on their own faith journeys and the role of women in ministry.
I think my favorite thing Dr. Ciampa said to me, was that Ephesians was “written in the key of worship.”
Dr. Ciampa mentions a document he compiled to help students understand first century Greco-Roman views of women and marriage, beginning with Old Testament and Classical Greek texts up through the time of the New Testament, so that NT texts might be better understood in light of the developing contexts. You can read that insightful document here. And find more of Dr. Ciampa’s scholarly writings on his website, viceregency.com.
You can watch our conversation on YouTube, or stream it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and more–find all those links on Podlink! Please like, subscribe, rate and share with a friend if you found this interview helpful!
Transcript:
Ruth Perry (00:16) This is a new thing for me and I appreciate you being one of my very first guests, Dr. Ciampa.
Roy Ciampa (00:22) Well, I’m honored to be invited and hope this will be helpful to people.
Ruth Perry (00:26) What I’m hoping to share on my podcast for my first season is I’m going to go back and have conversations with people who helped me as my faith has shifted and changed over the last 20 years. Because my background is very conservative, complementarian, traditional, But it’s changed a lot over the years through crises of faith and through cognitive dissonance that’s happened and different things that have gone on. And I’m just really grateful that my faith has remained strong because I’ve encountered people like you who’ve helped me to reimagine my faith and think about things differently.
Roy Ciampa (01:04) That’s nice to hear.
Ruth Perry (01:04) And so at the time that I had you as a professor, I was a complementarian student, pretty committed to that perspective. And I was an educational ministries student at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. And I think that I took Ephesians as one of my core theology classes. And it’s the only class that I encountered you as a professor. But looking back on my seminary experience, I really loved that class so much and the book of Ephesians has just remained my favorite book of the Bible.
And I’m really grateful that I had that experience because I didn’t have to learn Greek or Hebrew in seminary as an education student. And this was the only class where we really went through word by word and you taught how to parse Paul’s Greek into English and how to make sense of his run on sentences and you taught the importance of understanding the context of the passage. And I just learned so much from you. And so I’m really excited to talk about that with you today. But I thought before we get into that, I would like to know more about you. I don’t really know what your faith formation was like, your background, where you’re coming from. If you’d like to just go back and tell us a little bit about your own spiritual journey.
Roy Ciampa (02:15) Sure, I’d be happy to. I grew up in an nominal Christian family. We went to church about once a year because my grandmother wanted us to. I was confirmed in a Congregational church when I was, I suppose, a young teenager. But it didn’t really mean much. I never really understood anything about the Bible.
I came to faith when I was in my first year of college, I owe it, a large part of it, I owe, I think, to next door neighbors who moved in when I was in middle school. Wonderful, dedicated Christians, the Monk family, and they had two sons, one a year older than me and one a year younger, Robert and Stuart. And the whole family just modeled for me, a wonderful Christian faith and love. And so they took me to evangelistic events.
But I didn’t think that I thought I was a Christian. I remember sitting during one, in a roller skating rink while somebody was speaking and we had our heads down and I’m saying that this isn’t for me. I’m already Christian. They’re not talking about me. I’m a Christian. Anyway, it was my first year of college. Some guys shared the gospel with me and I realized that this was the message that had transformed their lives and their family and I realized it was true and I was in need of it and so I trusted in the Lord and I was baptized, came to faith, I was discipled.
But I was in a very conservative context. I was listening to the guys that discipled me had me listening to some fundamentalist preachers. John R. Rice wrote a book I Am a Fundamentalist and after a year I felt like God was calling me into ministry and I went to Jerry Falwell’s school at the time was called Liberty Baptist College for a year. And then after a year there I transferred to Gordon College where I did my undergraduate degree.
By the time I graduated from Gordon College, well certainly I was no longer a fundamentalist, was I would say mainstream evangelical and probably still conservative on women’s issues but very open to other ways of understanding that issue.
I don’t really remember at what point, if it was near the end of my college experience or beginning of my seminary experience, I went to Denver Seminary, had some great mentors there. And I know while I was at Denver Seminary, I became a convinced egalitarian.
And that came out of various kinds of experiences. Part of it was coming to have a much better understanding of the world in which the New Testament was written, and especially Paul, in the context of his letters and the things that he says about women, among other things. And part of it was just understanding more broadly what theology would say about how I should relate to my own wife and other women as well.
But maybe we’ll get around to that later. After seminary, my wife and I were appointed to go overseas and we had two kids by then and we took our kids and we went to Portugal where I trained pastors. And overall, our time in Portugal span about 12 years, and in the middle of that, I spent a couple of years in Scotland doing my PhD.
I had wonderful time training pastors and Christian leaders in Portugal, worked with the Bible Society there to help with their contemporary Portuguese translation of the Bible. And then I was invited to go teach at Gordon-Conwell in 2001. So I taught the New Testament studies at Gordon-Conwell from 2001 to 2014. At a certain point became the Chair of the Division of Biblical Studies there.
And then after or 13 years there, I went and worked for four years for American Bible Society, training Bible translators and Bible translation consultants around the world. I still taught for Gordon Conwell on weekends while I was doing that, but my main gig was training Bible translators and Bible translation consultants. So that was a great experience, but I missed the full-time academic community.
So in 2018 I accepted the invitation to take on the role of Chair of the Religion Department which soon became the Department of Biblical and Religious Studies at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. But.
In 2024, I retired and moved back to New Hampshire, which is where my wife and I had had a place for a while, and it’s our happy place. And so I’m now a professor emeritus at Stanford University, and I teach a course a semester for Gordon Conwell. I’m teaching Interpreting the New Testament for Gordon Conwell on Thursdays right now. So I mean, that’s that’s more than you wanted, probably, but that’s kind of the overview.
Ruth Perry (06:38) No, that’s great. Congratulations on retiring and then continuing your work.
Roy Ciampa (06:44) Thank you. Well, there’s lots of what I’ve done that I love. I’m still writing books and articles and teaching one day a week scratches that itch. so it’s fun.
Ruth Perry (06:53) I’m a Gordon College graduate myself. I was a music major there and the reason why I decided to study music was because I loved the church and I wanted to be in ministry and that’s where I saw women serving in the church. So I studied music and then I decided to go to Gordon Conwell in 2003 when I graduated from Gordon College because I still loved learning so much and I wanted to continue learning and in my conception of my ministry life, I always conceived myself as just being in volunteer ministry in the church. And that I would be a pastor’s wife, likely, or a missionary’s wife. I really wanted to live overseas. I went backpacking through Europe while I was in college, and Portugal was my favorite. I loved Portugal.
Roy Ciampa (07:41) It’s a great country.
Ruth Perry (07:41) And so I would have liked to have been a missionary or a musician, but those were really the only two ideas that I had in my brain that a woman could do in the church. I knew that I loved the church more than anything and I really wanted to serve the church. So that’s what brought me to Gordon-Conwell and brought me to your classroom. And it sounds like it was early on in your teaching there.
Roy Ciampa (08:00) Yeah, it was early on at Gordon-Conwell. I taught for a number of years in Portugal, but that was in my early years at Gordon-Conwell, yes. And I remember that course called Ephesians in Depth, as I recall.
Ruth Perry (08:09) It was in depth for sure. Yes. I remember we went word by word and we would, I can’t even remember how to explain what you did with us in the class. I was trying to find my class notes because I know that they’re in my basement somewhere. But I remember we parsed every sentence and figured out what the structure was. And you really brought it.
Roy Ciampa (08:29) Ha
Ruth Perry (08:37) It was hard work and it brought the book to life for me.
Roy Ciampa (08:41) That’s so kind of you to say. I’m grateful to hear that.
Ruth Perry (08:43) And it’s such a beautiful book. Ephesians, it just, the words that come to mind when I think about Ephesians is, Paul keeps talking about peace and love and unity and the power of the Holy Spirit and all the blessings that we’ve received from God. And it’s just such a beautiful theological grounding of then why we should follow Christ and live in a way worthy of the calling we’ve received.
And so I don’t know how much you want to talk about Ephesians itself before we get to the household codes in Ephesians 5. But what I really want to talk with you too for my Beautiful Kingdom Builders audience is the context of the book of Ephesians and what was going on in the cultural world at that time that would have helped the people who are hearing Paul’s message in that day understand it maybe differently than we understand it today.
Roy Ciampa (09:35) Well, yeah, there’s a lot to talk about. So many different aspects of it. And I think one of the things, actually in our church, we’re in a small group right now that’s going through Ephesians. And so it’s been kind of fun to do that in a church Bible study again. But one of the things I think that’s key to Ephesians, you just have this joyful, kind of, I would say worshipful kind of tone to the whole thing.
Many people have pointed out that the letter has a different style than most of Paul’s letters. It has these kind of run-on sentences and these kind of complicated sentences. There’s lots of what we call pleonasms where you could say something simply, but in a pleonasm you could put up two or three different ways of saying it within the same sentence. So over and over again Paul will say we have kind of this blessing of redemption, the forgiveness of our sins. And it’s like, well, those are two different ways of talking about the same thing, or he’ll talk about within one line, he does this a couple of times in the opening part of Ephesians, that everything’s happened according to God’s purpose and his will and his choice. It’s like, well, those are just three different ways of saying God did what he wanted to do.
And I’m reminded that, We find examples of this in various contexts. We find it in poetry and we find it in worship music. An example I typically use is the song Majesty, Worship His Majesty. And if you go through that song over and over again, it finds different ways to say the same thing in new words. Kingdom authority, majesty, kingdom authority, so exalt, lift up on high. Those are two different things, they’re not. Exalt, lift up on high, the name of Jesus. Magnify, come glorify. What’s the difference between magnifying, it’s all the same thing.
Singing this is just a worshipful, excited, rich, different way of expressing yourself. And Paul begins the letter with what’s called a Jewish Baruchah, which in Hebrew would be blessed, be like Baruch HaTah, Adonai Eloheinu, blessed as the Lord our God. he starts out, blessed is the…
God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every blessing in Christ. And so I think the style is different and I think it’s different for a purpose because Paul’s wanting to express his theology in a very worshipful almost liturgical kind of way.
And it’s remarkable that he’s doing that while he’s under arrest. He says he’s in chains, which reminds us of Acts of course, when they’re imprisoned in Philippi and they end up singing songs and praising God in prison. And here Paul is, he’s in prison and he writes a letter and he writes it in the key of worship. And partly that’s because just who Paul is and partly because he’s writing to readers who are Gentiles, who are so far away from where Christianity began in Jerusalem and Judea. And they’ve got to be thinking as Gentiles, like their spiritual leader is now in prison and could lose his life.
What does this mean? Have they gotten themselves messed up with something they shouldn’t have? Has a train gone off the rails and they’ve got to be concerned about Paul. They’ve got to be concerned about what all this means. And here’s Paul, he writes from prison, he’s like, God’s plan is working itself out in this wonderful way and it’s such a blessing to me to be a part of this. let’s praise God for all the blessings that we have. And let me just list off some of these blessings for you.
And it really is, I think, meant to reassure the readers that… the train hasn’t gone off the rails, that God is in charge, that everything that they’ve experienced is part of God’s plan of redemption and of reconciling Jews and Gentiles together and to God, and that Paul is not at all, know, fretting or depressed or himself concerned that something’s gone wrong because he’s in prison, but he sees God’s hand in all of this. So I think that’s a, for me, that’s a very important part of the background.
And then you have to be careful because I’m tempted to try and lecture my way through a whole semester’s worth of stuff on Ephesians in one little conversation. But I do think, you know, that most people recognize that two halves of the letter have different tones and sometimes they describe the first half as doctrine and the second as practical teaching.
But an important key is that it’s not just that Paul decided to talk and discuss theology for a while and then look at his watch and said, well, that’s maybe enough theology for them. Maybe I should give them some practical stuff. And so let me talk practical stuff for a while. But the theology underwrites the practical part. That is, the theology, the first part is there to support everything he’s going to tell the church that they ought to be doing.
And the second part, they are organized organically related to each other. And the whole first part is about God’s grace, his mercy, his love, how he hasn’t treated us the way we deserve when we were, you know, children of wrath by nature. He hasn’t treated us that way, but he’s shown us love and mercy and grace and blessing upon blessing upon blessing. And then we get in the second half of the letter. And in my understanding, the second half of letter is primarily all about imitating God.
And so we get that theme early on how we should be imitators of God. We shouldn’t live like the Gentiles live. That’s one of the themes. But we should be imitators of God. And then he talks about how God has shown his love to us in Jesus Christ who gave himself for us and his love for us. And so we have sections that talk about how we should be one, united together as one body.
And then we have material talking about how we should and love and we should walk in the light and then later how we should walk in wisdom and then finally the last part is where we should put on the full armor of God and we look at those things they come what do these things have in common being one walking in love and light and wisdom well love and light are two main attributes of God God is love God is light
And then wisdom is another very well-known attribute of God, the all-wise one. And there’s large sections of scripture dedicated to wisdom and Proverbs 8 and elsewhere. And that’s understood to be an attribute of God. And then you think,
When we walk in love, we’re imitating God. When we walk in light, we’re imitating God. When we walk in wisdom, we’re imitating God and His wisdom. And then you realize that the full armor of God we’re supposed to put on is not just armor that God gives us, but the Old Testament background tells us this is the armor that God puts on. He puts on a helmet of salvation. He puts on a breastplate of righteousness. When he goes and he fights spiritual battles for his people. So even when we put on our spiritual armor, we’re still imitating God.
That earlier part about being one, it’s like, that’s right, God is one. So when we’re one, you there’s one God, one Lord, one baptism, and when we act as one, we’re also imitating God. So one of the greatest ways we imitate God then, when you understand the relationship between the first half of the letter and the second half, is by treating other people the way he’s treated us.
He hasn’t treated us as he could have, but he treated us with love, with mercy, with grace, over and over again. And this ends up becoming very important for, as you referred to, the household codes, because they’re a main theme is about how people in charge with authority treat people that in that culture were under them, wives were under their husbands and children under the parents and slaves under their masters. And so one of the main themes that comes out there is, again, the emphasis tends to be on the person with power, treating the one with less power with grace and mercy and not being harsh with them. But I mean, that raises all kinds of other questions about why do we have household codes and what’s this about?
We’re talking about household codes, we’re talking about slaves and masters. And we don’t have slaves and masters in our household. We think of those as something outside the family. You get your family, and then you get your employees or other people. But of course, that was part of the family. But hey, I’ve been going on for a while now, Ruth, so maybe feel free.
Ruth Perry (18:02) No, you’re cooking. I’m enjoying it immensely. I was thinking about back to your class, I remember that before we got into the household codes, you started that passage in Ephesians 5.18, be filled with the Holy Spirit, singing songs and hymns and spiritual songs to each other, making music in your heart to the Lord and always giving thanks to God the Father for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ and submitting to each other out of reverence for Christ. That all of those things were under that same heading of be filled with the Holy Spirit.
Roy Ciampa (18:42) Yes, it is. And being filled with the Holy Spirit is under the heading of walking in wisdom. So, because it’s one of the things is if you look for the term walking, which is often translated as live, like live in love or live according to light. The metaphor is walking in the light and walking in love and walking in children of light or walk wisely. And then the wisdom part underneath that is all the stuff about being filled with the spirit and submitting to one another.
And then so all that stuff about husbands and wives and parents and children and masters and slaves comes under the submitting to one another part, which comes under the being filled with the Holy Spirit part, which comes under the walking in wisdom part.
And it’s Paul providing his readers with wisdom about how to live in family in the first century Ephesian or, you know, Greco-Roman context. And of course, it’s important that context is radically different from ours.
Ruth Perry (19:44) Can you describe that context for us.
Roy Ciampa (19:47) Sure. Well, in a few different ways. Maybe one way to start is by, just as we were already kind of hinting at…
that when we talk about a household code, we do talk about husbands and wives and parents and children and masters and slaves because the household was very differently structured than we think of it today. That many households, they had slaves within the household and they’d have also freed men and free women in some cases in the household as well. And so we think of a household typically as, you know, parents and their children and nuclear family.
And sometimes we think of the extended family as well. Maybe there are grandparents around or something. But we don’t think of parents and children and slaves and freed men and women as part of a household. But that is a part of what a fairly well-to-do or a somewhat well-to-do household would have all those components. And then, you know, we realize
When people preach through Ephesians, when they get to the stuff about slaves and masters, they realize what we don’t approve of masters and slaves today. And so if they’re to preach on that, they kind of adapt it and say, well, this might apply to like employees and employers and that sort of thing. And so here we can get some wisdom for how we can relate to each other as employees and employers. And maybe there’s it’s OK. But it’s really important to point out that employees are not slaves and employers are not masters. And so you have to make adaptations.
You can’t just say all the employers shouldn’t treat the employees the way Paul thought, you know, masters should treat slaves. And we have to be reminded that Paul’s not endorsing slavery, but early Christians were living in a world where this is just part of the social fabric. They weren’t put in charge. They weren’t asked to take over the social fabric and restructure it. They had to learn how can they live as Christians within that social fabric and within these institutions. And so Paul provides wisdom for those who are in these situations.
But as I was saying, when we get to that stuff about masters and slaves, people say, we have to make adjustments. We can’t just apply that to employees and employers because that’s not the same thing. But when we preach about husbands and wives, people look around and say, I know husbands and wives, and many of us will say, well, I’m a husband or I’m a wife and I have a wife or a husband. And so they’re all around us. So when he starts talking about husbands and wives, we’re like, okay, we know what he’s talking about.
This is something very familiar to all of us, except that it isn’t because marriage has evolved in many ways. And so to go back and realize that in the Greco-Roman world, Men didn’t typically marry until they were 28 to 30 years old. And partly because there was no expectation with the double standard that’s typical in all of history, the double standard with regard to sex is that men weren’t expected to remain pure or virgins until marriage. They had access to prostitutes and household slaves and other sexual outlets and that wasn’t considered a problem by most people in the Greco-Roman world. Whereas women were expected to be married shortly after going through puberty.
When I was in class, I have like a 40 page document, you may or may not recall of this kind of material from the Old Testament and quotes from the Greco-Roman world and different sources where people are talking about husbands and wives and it talks about age at marriage and it talks about, you know, the understanding that it’s good if a woman or girl can know how to carry on a conversation and maybe do a little bit of sewing, a little bit of cooking, but that’s about it because she’s supposed to learn everything she learns from her husband that she’s supposed to be like a tabla rasa, she’s supposed to be like a blank slate on whom the husband can leave his impressions.
I was just reading, reviewing again because something came up on social media. I don’t remember what it was anymore, but it was about, that’s what it was, this woman’s book recently. A woman wrote a book on misogyny in America and the publisher accidentally put out an ad or an email inviting people to submit for exam copies. whoever prepared the text for that forgot to replace the name of the author from a previous book they must have worked on. And so they had the title of the book in the book cover, but the author’s name was a man who hadn’t written anything like this, who writes in very different subjects.
So here’s a book on misogyny in the church, and the publisher puts out something that attributes it to a man instead of the woman who wrote it, and reminded me of this ancient… thing about somebody who’s talking about some man’s wife who’s a man who’s great at poetry and he’s presented some poetry from his wife and he claims that his wife wrote this wonderful poetry and this person’s saying it’s great poetry but you know I’m not sure if his wife really wrote it but either way the husband deserves the credit because either he’s the one who really wrote it or He’s the one that taught her.
So whatever the woman produces, it’s always back to the man. Because again, she’s expected to have learned whatever she knows through her husband, a woman getting married right after puberty and a man not marrying until he’s 28 or 30 years old. There’s a huge difference, not only in age, but maturity, knowledge of the world and in the Greco-Roman world, the extent to which women were expected to be more or less confined to the home, whereas men could go anywhere and could have a greater education so their knowledge of the world is different. Their human development at marriage and then throughout marriage. You might say, 10 years later it’ll be different. Well, 10 years later they still, they would have already formed a kind of relationship where he’s practically like a parent.
The husband’s practically a parent or Ben Witherington describes it as almost an uncle-niece relationship between a husband and wife at that time. And that changes a lot. I mean, that helps you understand all kinds of things in the New Testament when people are talking about how husbands and wives should relate to each other. It’s a significant thing in terms of submission if the wife has always only been kind of tutored by her husband and taught by him and mentored by him.
You know, three stages of human development behind him, then it’s natural that the man’s going to be treated as though he’s more knowledgeable, wiser, more experienced, better able to provide any kind of leadership needed, and that that’s the role that he should have. Which brings us back to that whole thing about love and mercy.
One of things that I realized when I started looking through these texts and thinking about it more was if one of the main themes of the letter is that we should treat each other as Christ and God has treated us, if my wife is my peer, which is something that just was not normally ever the case in the Greco-Roman world, right? We were just talking about that. But my wife is more or less my age. She has the same experience of the world. She hasn’t been cooped up at home. She’s got college education. She has, a master’s degree. She’s wiser than I am on many things and just as intelligent as I am. If she’s my peer in every way, does Jesus, does God really want us to pretend as though I’m much wiser and more knowledgeable than she is and better able to lead in every situation than she is?
Because that was the traditional slot of a wife in first century Ephesus and the slot of a husband in first century Ephesus or should I actually treat her for who she really is? And to recognize her strengths and her knowledge and her wisdom and her abilities. And this relates to something I’ve sometimes referred to as the mapping of identities. That is, we look at women today and we map onto them the identity we find of a wife in the first century Ephesus. We look at a husband today and we map onto them the identity of a husband in first century Ephesus. And we do that in other ways as well. I have an whole article about ways in which this mapping of identities can create real problems.
But I don’t think I should ask my wife to try and fill a slot from a different culture and time, asks her to treat me and asks me to treat her as though we are so different, as though we are as different as the first century Greco-Roman husband and wife, when in fact we’re actually peers. And then I’d go back and realize that if this whole second part is about learning how to treat other people…as God has treated us, and I realize, well, even if you look at the household code, the instructions to husbands and wives aren’t exactly the same as the husbands to parents and children, and neither of those are the same as the instructions to slaves and masters. So Paul recognized that although we’re all supposed to be Christ-like and treat others in Christ-like ways, the nature of the relationship is going to impact what that looks like.
And so the first century Greco-Roman husband-wife relationship is different from the parent-child relationship is different from the slave-master relationship. So Paul provides different instructions. So then I begin to think and realize, well, then we can treat this as a case study.
We have at least three case studies and what it means to apply Christ-like, God-like love and mercy and grace to other people. And it’s one thing in the marriage, one thing with the children, another thing with masters and slaves. Maybe it would be something else if it was with a spouse who is my peer and who is as intelligent and wise and able to lead and do other things as I am, as my same age, same experience of the world, what would it then mean for me to treat her in a Christ-like way and for her to treat me in a Christ-like way and not try to fit them into some…
You know, I’m reminded we have a two and a half year old granddaughter, you know, those cubes you get that have the different shapes, there’s the triangle and there’s the square and the rectangle and the star and you have the blocks, you’re trying to fit them through the right shapes, you know, and I feel like lots of times they’re taking, you know, modern men and women who are very different shapes and we’re trying to fit them into the shapes of the first century husband and wife, male and female.
And those pieces just don’t fit. And the key question still comes back to, if I’m looking at the second half of Ephesians, I’m learning how to walk wisely in acting in Christ-like ways towards people around me.
And so there lots of different relationships. There’s the student athlete relationship. There’s the police officer citizen relationship. There’s the teacher student relationship. There’s the husband wife relationship. There’s the employee employee employee relationship. And all of these we learn how to treat each other in loving ways. But we don’t have to find some first century Greco-Roman slot to fit people into to make that relationship match the one we have.
Ruth Perry (31:02) I feel like the way my brain works is that I have a sieve inside my brain and when I go to class I learn the information and it all goes away. But for some reason I really latched on to all of that that you taught 20 years ago and then I went off and I got married the next year and it just fell completely into traditional rules because that’s what I grown up with and that’s what had been modeled to me and same for my husband. And so it was just natural to not even think about how we’re going to relate to each other. We just fell into the traditional rules that we had been taught through example and direct teaching. And almost immediately for me as the woman, I could recognize that my voice was diminished, my importance was diminished, and it created some cognitive dissonance for me. But I didn’t, I just tolerated it. I didn’t really rock the boat any.
And then we had another experience early on in our marriage. I’m thinking maybe three or four years after we got married, our church had a really terrible conflict and split. My dad was a pastor and so it was deeply personal. And you’re teaching again on the book of Ephesians. I looked at that experience and it was a traditional church structure with men in leadership. And it was clear as day to me that if the women had a voice and a place at the table in that conflict, things wouldn’t have been as ugly as they were and as destructive and terrible. And so those two things, like my early marriage years and walking through that church conflict,
The importance of your teaching on the book of Ephesians really snapped into place for me crystal clear that if we are walking in a manner worthy of the calling we’ve received, we’re going to submit to one another, male, female, slave, free, Gentile. Like there’s no distinctions that if we’re truly living in the way that God has called us to live, that we’re going to love each other. And that means we’re going to listen to each other’s voices, that every voice has a place and has value.
And we’re going to submit the mutual submission piece that we often gloss straight over and go into, OK, but wives, you’re submitting, and then the husband is the head.
Roy Ciampa (33:12) Mm-hmm. Right, yes. No, it really, it ends up being, and I hate to say it, but in many cases, not a loving sort of thing, but a very obedience, command-centered sort of thing, which kind of is pushing them back against the grain of the letter as a whole, and the way I understand the theology of the letter as a whole.
By the way, one of the key texts that I think is helpful for thinking about this is in 1 Corinthians chapter 14, where Paul has that part that says, and some people think that this doesn’t belong in the Bible, and I don’t know what you think, but I think verses 34 and 35 are supposed to be there. But it’s the part that says women should remain silent in the churches, they’re not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says.
They want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home, for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church. Now Paul had already taught that both men and women could pray and prophesy, right, back in chapter 11. And that’s remarkable in itself because a lot of people look at 1 Corinthians 11, they think, because it starts off about who’s the head of who, who’s the head you know, God is the head of Christ, who’s the head of the man, who’s head of the woman. it sounds like, okay, yeah, very much what sort of subordination here and all this sort of thing.
But when he actually gets into it, he talks about ministry in just two terms, prayer and prophecy. Gordon Fee has suggested, and I think he’s probably right, that those are like big terms for discourse directed to God. That’s prayer and discourse directed at the congregation, which is prophecy. But in any case, those are the only two things he talks about. And he says both men and women can do it. They just have to dress appropriately when they’re doing it. So there’s nothing in there about any kinds of ministries that men can do that women can’t.
But anyway, so he’s already said that they can pray and prophesy. So what’s this all about? They should remain silent. And so obviously he’s not speaking about speaking in general. He has certain kinds of speaking. And in that very passage, he says, if they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home. Well, that may be the hint that what he’s talking about is women who don’t understand something that’s going on.
Again, remember the women would have less education, less experience of the world, less knowledge of what’s going on around them. And if they don’t know what’s going on and they’re asking questions that are interrupting them in the church, and in that culture, for a woman to ask another man, somebody else’s husband their question, would be really offensive and would raise all kinds of concerns. Anyway, so.
If that’s what’s going on, Paul says if they have things they should inquire of their own husbands at home. Now, you know, I may have said this when I taught you in class, but I mean, I’ve been teaching since, you know, a full-time teacher since I suppose I started in 1991. And I don’t know how many times I could have said, having both a husband and a wife in my class, I could have said to the husband, if you’re not getting all this, you might ask your wife to explain it to you when you get home.
I’ve very often had husbands and wives in the class and it’s not unusual for the wife to understand things better than to be more academically strong than the husband is. I could never say, you know, if any of the women here don’t understand what I’m talking about, why don’t you ask your own husband at home? not that I couldn’t just say it because it wouldn’t be politically correct, but it would just be stupid.
And I’m not saying Paul’s stupid, The expression assumes a culture and a context where the husband can be virtually guaranteed to know more and understand things better than their wife, which is perfectly reasonable for the Greco-Roman context of Corinth that Paul’s speaking to, not Corinth and Ephesus and the whole world in which Paul’s speaking because of this age and education and experience gap that we talked about at the beginning of our conversation. So a verse like that makes perfectly good sense in that context, but would make absolutely no sense in a world where men and women can both be educated and experienced And so again, I think it really is a problem of, I think, very harmful biblical interpretation when
We end up trying to act as though we are living in roles that were filled by first century people. And we’re gonna figure out how to treat each other in those roles as opposed to treating people for who they actually are. And that’s at the core of love, isn’t it? To know someone, to respect them for who they are, for what they bring to the table, and to learn from each other and to submit to each other.
And that’s really a large part of what effusions is about.
Ruth Perry (38:10) I think from my background being very conservative, there was a lot of warning against listening to people who didn’t share traditional values because they were being influenced by the culture around them or they were playing fast and loose with scripture and they weren’t taking the word of God seriously or this or that. Like there were so many warnings against listening to someone who might suggest mutual submission or sharing authority between men and women in ministry and in the home.
And in my experience, just with my encounter of you, Dr. Ciampa and since you, many other egalitarian scholars and pastors, they’ve all taken the word of God seriously, and their life has shown the fruit of the Spirit in ways that isn’t always readily witnessed in other people’s lives who are really clinging to the authority structures and having power over others. And so I’m really grateful that I took this Ephesians class with you 20 something years ago and that I remembered all the information even though I compartmentalized it at the time and filed it away and went on with my traditional ways. I’m grateful that it was accessible when I needed it and when things started falling apart. And so then I didn’t just say Well, if this is what Christianity is, I don’t want it. But I could imagine a more beautiful Christianity because of what you had taught me.
Roy Ciampa (39:42) That’s very kind, but I think that it is very sad to see people turning away from Christianity because the presentation they’ve received is not wholesome, it’s not healthy, it’s not edifying. And too often it is, as you said, very much about power and who can have power. And so it’s very sad to see large parts of a whole generation are more that are turning away from the church because of the way the church in Christianity has been presented, which is sad. And we do think it’s such a beautiful thing. The truth of God’s grace and the grace that he teaches us to live by ought to be something that ought to attract people from all over the globe to this great God of love and grace and mercy who’s worthy of all our praise.
Ruth Perry (40:30) the message of Ephesians is speaking to us today. And I pray we all have ears to hear.
Where can we find your papers and your writing? Dr. Ciampa, do you have a website or do you have the online presence?
Roy Ciampa (40:43) I have a website. Yeah, actually, but it’s not it’s just a purely pedagogical sort of thing. And I, and I’ve spent hundreds of hours, if not thousands, thousands in the heyday of my career. So I have a I have a website called viceregency.com And the.com is a joke, because I’ve never done any commercial stuff with it. should be a.org. But I have vice regency.com. And then it’s it’s all links to different things you can learn from and
Maybe I’ll go there and add a link to this paper. I’ll tell you what, I’ll send it to you in case there’s some place you want to post it on, on anything you’re doing.
Ruth Perry (41:20) I have a Facebook page called the Beautiful Kingdom Builders. I will put it there and I want to give you the last word before we sign off.
Roy Ciampa (41:31) Well, thank you for having me. It’s been a blessing to be with you and it is anything I can do to help people see how great and marvelous, as Paul was trying to say in Ephesians, how beyond anything we can imagine is the love of God, how deep and high and wide, and in every dimension you can imagine this love of God that we find in Jesus Christ and the mercy and love that it teaches us to express towards others.
May God advance that through the knowledge of Jesus Christ. So thanks for having me.
Ruth Perry (42:02) Thank you so much. Amen. Have a great time in your retirement and as you continue to teach. Thank you so much. Bye.
Roy Ciampa (42:08) Thank you very much. Bye bye.
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The Beautiful Kingdom Builders is a place for redemptive dialogue about gender, justice, abuse and healing in the Christian faith. Begun as a place to empower Christian women and girls to find our callings, TBKB has grown to conversations about all aspects of Christian faith and culture. Join us in building a more beautiful Christianity.
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